ABSTRACT
Gadamer's critique of Dilthey is either simplistic or implausible. It is simplistic when Gadamer claims that Dilthey was a positivist foundationalist. This ignores the powerful anti-foundationalist strands in Dilthey's thinking, which eventually led him to abandon his own project for a foundationalist psychology. Dilthey's position regarding historical objectivity corresponds to the more modest second option. While he fully recognized that the historicity of the historian conditions his theories about historical facts, he believed that it allows for the possibility of determining basic historical facts. It is implausible when it presupposes that the historicity of the historian makes it impossible to know the basic facts of history, or even to get beyond to some degree our own cultural conditioning. The failures of Gadamer's critique show the need for a re-assessment of Dilthey. Not that such a re-assessment needs to redeem or rehabilitate Dilthey; but at least it should proceed according to the standards of a strictly immanent critique.
